


Absolute Zero

by darlingargents



Series: Ladies Bingo 2018/2019 [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (lightly described), (not that canon does any better), Artistic License: Space Edition, Barriss-Centric, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Fear, Gen, Injury Recovery, Let Barriss Get Therapy 2k18, Major Character Injury, No Dialogue, Space Battles, Trauma, Umbara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 22:33:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16293080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: Space is cold.





	Absolute Zero

**Author's Note:**

> It wasn't serious enough to put in the tags, but warning for a brief moment that could be considered suicidal ideation, at the very end.
> 
> Anyway! Starting a new Ladies Bingo round with a bang and with a fic written at 2am because sleep sounds boring and turning off lights sounds scary. (I will look this over for typos in the morning but in the meanwhile please point them out if you see them.) This is for the prompt **Absolute Zero**. My card is [here](https://bluegansey.dreamwidth.org/148141.html).

Space is cold. Barriss has always known this. She’s experienced interstellar travel on a regular basis since she was an infant. She knows it as easily as she knows her own name, her own Code, her memories — space is cold.

And being exposed to it for prolonged periods of time will kill you. It won’t kill her as quickly as most — she’s a Jedi, and like most trained Force-users, she has enough tricks up her sleeve to get out of situations most beings would find deadly — but if she finds herself ejected from her starfighter mid-battle, or jettisoned into the inky abyss when the ship she’s on is bombed, she’s not likely to make it. Her Force ability is enough to get her to the nearest respite from space, but only if it’s close enough.

Space is cold. Space is the coldest thing she’ll ever know intimately. When the parasitic snakes invaded her ship, took over her body, and Ahsoka turned on the cold, she nearly froze to death, and that was cold — but if Ahsoka had instead shattered the viewport in the bridge and tossed her out, she would’ve frozen nearly instantaneously. It’s not even in the same category.

She didn’t realize she was afraid of it until Umbara.

Barriss has always considered herself to be good at keeping her head. Good at not snapping under pressure, good at staying clear-minded even when panic descends on the most level-headed of her officers. So when she flies over Umbara, the sky of the dark planet lit up with blasterfire and screaming engines, she’s nearly entirely calm. Her shots find their targets nearly always, and she avoids most damage.

Until the Umbarans realize that her starfighter is the one containing a Jedi, and six of their ships descend on her at once, like a swarm of bugs. They target her as one, and blasterfire surrounds her ship, battering it relentlessly, so much that she can hardly see around her. She does the only thing she can think of: goes into a dive, spins around, and flies straight up out of the atmosphere. They’re near the top, and she can see she’s entering full space, leaving the planet behind, as the bright light around her clears and she can see again.

Her shields are severely damaged. She needs to get back to the main ship and either switch starfighers or do some very fast repairs. She spins, looks down at Umbara and the field of battle, at the carnage below her. Her stomach churns in horror and disgust, and she pushes it down; now is not the time to think about it, even though the only thing she can feel in the Force is the agony of dying men.

Umbara is a killing field, one of the worst slaughters in the war. She won’t find out until later that some of the pain she’s feeling is from men being killed by their own brothers, and by their own commander.

She’s made the decision to go in for repairs, and has asked over radio to be covered on her exit, when she’s spotted again. The Umbarans swarm her and she tries to get out, redirects shield power to her engines for a thrust of energy—

And a blaster bolt hits her viewport, shattering it into thousands of pieces, and Barriss is exposed to empty space. Behind her, the Umbarans are being shot down by the backup she called for, but she can’t tell. She can’t feel anything, except her breath being frozen in her lungs. She tries to breathe and there’s nothing, there’s nothing but the cold. It’s not like anything she’s ever felt before. It’s not bitter, not wet, not wind that cuts into her — it’s nothing.

Cold doesn’t exist, she finds herself remembering as she ejects out of her fighter and tries, desperately, to make it to the ship. Cold doesn’t exist. It’s the absence of warmth. That’s what this feels like: acute absence. Painful nothing.

She blacks out seconds later, and thinks, before she does, that her death is imminent.

She wakes up in a hospital bed, in a medical centre parsecs away. The battle of Umbara is over. She doesn’t find out, then, why the death toll is so high, but she can feel it in her bones, along with the cold.

When she wakes up, Luminara is there.

She didn’t realize until she saw her that Luminara is the only person she wants to see. She doesn’t cry, but her chest constricts uncomfortably, and Luminara takes her hand, gently, and squeezes. It’s more physical contact than Barriss can ever remember having with her before.

She’s a knight, now, so she doesn’t know exactly why Luminara is here, but she’s grateful. She isn’t quite ready to talk yet, so Luminara does instead, quietly outlining the medical procedures she went through — bacta, mostly, a few days in a tank of it, along with minor surgeries to preserve her eyes and her extremities that she almost lost. She was saved, as it turns out, by sheer luck: one of the soldiers under her command, a clone named Driver, was passing by to get back to the main ship and refuel, and saw her drifting. He called it in and she was recovered via tractor beam before being rushed to the medical wing, and transferred to this facility shortly after.

She’s been asleep for a week. It’s one of her first weeks as a knight and she spent it bedridden.

At least, she reminds herself, she’s alive, albeit with a new fear.

*

Some time later, as she sits in her cell, her mind flashing through her worst memories and terrors, she keeps coming back to that. To being out in open space, to feeling the acute absence of anything that can sustain life.

And when she remembers Luminara, remembers the feeling of warm skin and belief, the feeling of being cared for and loved — well, that’s just as painful. It’s another memory that cuts down into her skin, past the muscle, down to the bone. Another memory with teeth.

Most of her memories have teeth. She closes her eyes and imagines a bomb in a hangar, the frozen caves of Ilum, the bodies stacked high on Umbara. Imagines space, the vast and empty nothingness, wrapping around her wrists and pulling her in, absorbing her, taking her back to the Force.

It’s comforting. The Force will take her back, as it always does, and she will be nothing more than what it wills.


End file.
